


This is Not the End

by imissthembutitwasntadisaster



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Redemption, but it's not actually about the love, it's about learning to want something for someone other than yourself, love in the time of the apocalypse, or to do something
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:49:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29859753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imissthembutitwasntadisaster/pseuds/imissthembutitwasntadisaster
Summary: Vivien Talbot didn’t have hands that could fix things, but it was the end of the world, or it had been the end of the world, and the camp they had set up in the abandoned hospital had new people stumbling into it every day, and she had somehow been forgotten in all the issuing of jobs, and there wasn’t much else for her to do.  So she volunteered at the makeshift clinic set up in the east wing.Slowly, she learns to care to help others.
Relationships: Vivien Talbot/Edgar Selwyn (minor)





	This is Not the End

Vivien Talbot didn’t have hands that could fix things. She never had. She could take, and she could break, and she did both of those with abandon. But it was the end of the world, or it had been the end of the world, and the camp they had set up in the abandoned hospital had new people stumbling into it every day, and she had somehow been forgotten in all the issuing of jobs, and there wasn’t much else for her to do. So she volunteered at the makeshift clinic set up in the east wing. To be perfectly honest, it was mostly because of how much people were judging her for doing nothing. Word got around fast in the Building, as they had all started calling it, and she had never liked being disdained. 

Her hands shook too much for surgery or stitches which was what most of the patients needed, so she was set to menial tasks: running around the building looking for undiscovered drugs in underexplored rooms, finding people who might know or be related to injured newcomers, fetching things for the two doctors who had miraculously found their way to the camp. She had to clean a lot too, and she complained bitterly about it to anyone who would listen. Her hands grew calloused and she constantly stank and it was all just exhausting. 

(Back before, before it had all come crashing down, she had been an insurance auditor. Sometime she thought it was almost ironic, how when the real disaster came there wasn’t any pay-out for anyone, especially her. Well, not really ironic. She liked calling things ironic, though. It meant a certain type of intellectual would pay for her drinks). 

Six months passed, and you wouldn’t think that anyone was counting time but they were. Begrudgingly she admitted to herself that her work was getting easier. She didn’t like it any better, but at least people had stopped turning up their noses at her. They thought she was helping save people. She didn’t have hands that could save people, she never had. She smiled graciously and accepted their thanks anyway and never felt a whit of guilt about deceiving them all. She had been doing it her whole life, lying about where she had been, about who she was. She wanted to be adored and she found lies made that so much easier, so she kept on with them. 

That said, one day the doctors were called to the main door of the building. Someone new had come in, they were told, and he was bleeding pretty extensively. Vivien hadn’t spent six months with her ears completely stopped, so she dug around the storeroom until she found some tranexamic acid and a needle. It saved them shouting at her to move faster when they got back. She met them halfway back to the clinic, and later one of them, Melissa, pulled her aside and told her she had probably saved that man’s life. Vivien gave her the same smile she gave everyone who could be fooled into believing that she cared.

For the first time she lay awake that night thinking about someone else.

(She would never admit it, but the day after when the doctors were busy doing something else she hovered about near the recovering man, pretending to mess with some instruments on a table. He smiled at her, weakly. It was a different kind of thanks she found that day, and it made her feel like she was standing in the sun after a long day inside. It almost burnt her eyes, and she quickly walked away). 

More people came to the Building, many more useful than her. Eventually she realised that she was just taking up space in the clinic, compared to these better-trained newcomers with healing hands. She wandered aimlessly again for a week, trying to think of a way that would gain her respect without being too difficult until an old woman, Rose, stopped her and asked her a favour. She had a granddaughter, she said, who might come to the building one day. She wanted to write a letter to the girl, in case she died before. Would Vivien be so kind as to write it down? Her hands weren’t what they used to be, you see, and now you could barely read her handwriting.

You could barely read Vivien’s either, for that matter, but it was a little better, and Vivien did need something to do. This would get people to admire her, she told herself. (This might cause someone else to smile at her the way the man had in that bed, she almost whispered to herself when she was completely alone. She almost didn’t dare think it.) 

So she claimed possession of some of the old papers and documents left over, none of them needed anymore, and she wrote down Rose’s love for her missing grandchild. Of course news got around and dozens of people turned and asked her to write for them, and she did, whatever people asked of her. She wrote down stories people wanted to remember, and descriptions of art that was slipping out of their memory. She wrote lists of names and places, cities visited and cafes eaten at. And of course she wrote letters for parents and grandparents and children and grandchildren, sisters and brothers and best friends and lovers. She addressed them each with a to and a from and they piled up in the tiny room she had claimed as her study. Sometimes small children would ask her to write a letter for someone in the next corridor over. It was a game, it was fun for them to see their infant crushes or their best friends or their mamas and papas read what they had dictated and tell them how much they loved it. Vivien refused the first few times, hoarding paper close, trying to give her job a dignity. Eventually she broke down and handed out notes on tiny scraps. There was always children’s chatter near her study now, except for when she chased them all away and told them not to come back. They always did. 

Years passed and almost like a miracle (it certainly felt divine), reunions did happen. The Building had become almost a beacon to the stragglers. Some parties went out for food – animals had wandered back into the cities and plants could be planted in the cracks, so it was surprisingly easy to keep the Building fed. Many more went out to spray-paint directions on walls, find anyone living alone and bring them back, leave packets of as much food as the could spare in strategic places, hoping someone would find them. They put notes in those packets too. Vivien wrote those as well, and the pleading in each one, the desperation that someone would find them and follow their instructions and make their way to the Building (home, people had started calling it by now) grew in honesty with each one, just a little bit. Every day she was flooded with people who hoped against all reason, and every day her head broke above that water with a little more sympathy for their cause. 

People found each other and sobbed in each other’s arms. If someone had a letter addressed to them (and it was rare, but it was not utterly unknown) Vivien would give it to them, even if the writer was still alive. She saw a wife laughing through her tears at the letter her husband had dictated, while her husband stared at her like she was the only important thing left on this earth and she felt the same thanks as had been given by the saved man at the clinic. It burnt less this time. Sometimes the writers died and their found loved ones broke down at Vivien’s feet as they read these words from beyond the grave. She couldn’t comfort them, she didn’t know how. She wasn’t made for it. Her handwriting was still messy and she still broke things and she still mostly cared about herself. But, even while most of the time the letters were never claimed, Vivien found she did not like thinking about the “most of the time” any more. She much preferred the “sometimes.” 

Melissa came to visit often, bringing hot nettle tea. Jared, the other doctor, also dropped in. They often talked about the clinic, and Vivien found she missed it, just slightly. Perhaps more than slightly. One day she went to visit them, she sat on the edge of a table and they traded the same old stories. She started making it a regular occurrence. It was about this time too that she started attending the services in the part of the Building designated as the chapel. 

One day she was asked to dance at one of the regular Building-wide parties, and she recognised the man who made the request as someone who had arrived about seven months before. His name was Edgar, and he had read the letter from his dead sister there in front of her, unable to wait for privacy. She had had cancer, and little could be done. She passed away a year or so before he arrived. He had wept there in that cramped brown room, silently, before shaking Vivien’s hand and leaving. That had been a different kind of thanks too, like the smell of the first days of Autumn. She stood up with him now, and as he whisked her around the room she almost cried and she didn’t quite know why. 

There were too many people to stay now in the Building, so a plan was made to rebuild the crumbling buildings around it, to make new homes for people in a world that was just starting to feel permanent. Vivien was called to join the initiative. She tried to rationalise her acceptance to herself, but she couldn’t. She wanted to, she decided, and that was enough. It had to be enough. She didn’t let herself think about how she had never really wanted to do anything back before. 

Partway through the rebuilding one of the further-afield outgoing parties brought back pots and pots of paint from an abandoned shop. It was this which led to the discovery that Bella could paint the most incredible murals. She covered the walls of the rooms they had rebuilt with swooping birds and iridescent flowers and fantastical scenes of far-off lands. The first time Vivien saw it, she sagged against the wall and burst into tears. She had liked art before, of course, everybody did, but it had never been a big deal. Now she dreamed about the colours, and when she had a moment alone she often slipped back into the finished rooms to gaze at them again. 

Vivien Talbot insisted that she didn’t have hands that could fix things. Her paint jobs (plain, nothing like Bella’s) were bumpy and messy and showed streaks, but she flung herself recklessly into the oranges and jewel greens and deepest pinks. She wrote her letters with paint-flecked hands now. Edgar worked in fixing up the same house as her, and the first time he flicked paint at her she burst into a laugh as loud and real as the thunderstorms that still sometimes scared the little ones. 

As soon as it was finished a family moved into the house she had helped build. The couple had met at the Building and been married there and the children were little, they knew nothing of back before and Vivien found herself astonished that new children could even exist, that everything hadn’t all stopped, that apparently humanity was not in its death throes, not anymore. She had never seriously considered survival as lasting before. So she fought the cooks for grain and deer lard and fruit and hunted down old grandma Myrtle who everyone said had been a baker back before, and demanded she help her make a pie. She mixed and sliced and cut herself dozens of times and in the end it wasn’t much of anything, and the crust was a bit grainy and burnt on the top. But it was real, and Vivien presented it to this family as a housewarming gift and accepted their thanks as something real. She had wanted to make it for _them_ , she realised, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe at the realisation. 

Edgar was there, and he ate a slice of the pie and said it was the best thing he had tasted in years. She knew he was lying. 

Two weeks later, he kissed her and she knew it told the truth. 

Vivien Talbot married Edgar Selwyn in the chapel in the springtime. Melissa was her Maid of Honour and she and Jared and Myrtle and Bella and Rose and the children that constantly played near her study all cheered at the top of their lungs. 

That evening, Viv (Edgar called her Viv and she thought she liked it more than Vivien) wrote a letter to her husband and sealed it up. It was to be read far in the future, to remind them when they were old of how this day had been. Then she laid her pen down, shook out her cramped fingers, and crawled into bed. 

Vivien Talbot insisted that she didn’t have hands that could fix things. But really, that wasn’t her decision to make.


End file.
